It came suddenly, after all; to Yellow Star with a suddenness almost as devastating as that storm of bullets and shell out of a clear sky which had left her stranded, a nameless brown waif, on the frozen December sod, some fifteen years before.
The spring term had slipped quickly away, with Miss Ward installed as nurse and Doctor Brown calling every other day; with Miss Sophia looking grimmer and grayer than ever, and Lucy’s waxen face on the pillow relaxing into a loving smile as she repeated the daily formula which only Stella really believed:
“I shall be better to-morrow. Now the weather is getting so pleasant, I shall soon be out again.”
Then, one sultry July day, after a long “spell” of exhausting heat, there had come an alarming faintness and a “hurry call” for the Doctor. Miss Sophia was hastily sent for from the kitchen, where she had been taking the indignant Mrs. Maloney to task for “nicking” her old blue china … and presently, to poor Stella sitting, desperately anxious and unhappy, on the top step of the dark stairway, just outside her foster-mother’s door, came, not even kind-hearted Doctor Brown, but the business-like, white-capped nurse, with her curt message:
“Miss Sophia says you need not sit there any longer, Stella; Mrs. Waring is dead.”
Now, indeed, it was all Miss Sophia’s house, she thought; and it “pushed her out,” as she had said once when she first came to Laurel—pushed her away as with actual, bodily hands—a dark-skinned little alien, who did not “belong”! All of a sudden, she realized with dreadful sharpness that she was nothing, really, to that gentle soul who was gone, and who had pityingly taught the childish lips to call her “mother.” No, she was no Waring except in name—much less a Spellman or a Russell; those ghostly portraits in the shuttered parlor below disowned and despised her; she was only a stray—a foundling—only The-One-who-was-left-Alive.
Yellow Star sprang up and darted down the colonial stairway and out the sacred front door. The graveled, box-bordered walk echoed her flying feet, and the elm-trees, straining against a rising wind, seemed to peer anxiously after the light figure as it sped by. Then the gate clicked and she was away—away on the wings of the summer wind—not walking, scarcely even running, but flying toward the only near refuge her spirit knew, the dear, green, lonely House in the Woods!
Long before she could reach it, the storm broke. It was a storm that made timid Doris cower with her face hidden, there in her own mother’s cheerful sitting-room; even the weary Doctor thanked his stars that he had gotten safe home and his horse “put up” before the rain came.